Into a Writer's Head

To call...or not to call

That is the question.

One of the joys of writing is control over your world. As in, I control the world of my characters and everything that happens to them. Those writers who talk about the characters taking over the book? Yeah, no. That's them pretending they have no say, so as to make themselves feel better when they rip the lives of their characters apart.
And I relish that ripping. I love taking the world I've created and turning it upside down in order to completely break them down, just so they can find a way to recover. I'm the evil witch, the empress and the queen all rolled into one.
I love it!
Take, for example, the every day problem of calling the person you're dating. In the real world, a woman will agonize over whether the guy will call, or if she should call him, or if she should ignore the first call in order to look more unavailable...and so on and so on...
The list goes on indefinitely.
It's craziness. Ultimately, one or the other picks up the phone and dials. The call is either answered or ignored and when the stars align, a date is made.
But in my world, the world of craziness, misfortune, mind-reading and madness, that call leads to all sorts of trouble. So the heroine debates. She hems, haws, cries, calls friends in order to agonize verbally, and basically makes a nuisance of herself until a well-meaning friend tells her to get a grip. This conversation usually occurs on a phone line without call waiting, so that when the poor guy does call? Yeah, he gets a busy signal.
For 2 hours. This is usually about the point he figures she's so busy, she won't notice if he does call. So he hangs up the phone and heads out for a few beers with his buddies.
In the meantime, our heroine is sitting in her apartment, coming up with every possible means of torture she might be able to enact upon his poor unsuspecting soul simply because he's had the misfortune to not call when she thought he would.
Ultimately, as with any good romance, they will find a way back to one another. But until they do, I get to play the puppet-master (to borrow a phrase from a friend). I get to pull the strings and make 'em dance.
And dance they will...

posted by Erin @ 6:51 PM